Chapter 3
After being at the camp for a week, I wasn’t so sure I’d made the best choice.
Rather than giving me the time to think and clear my head, all being there had done was confused the fuck out of me.
Reading over the words I’d written in my journal over the seven days didn’t help at all.
At home, it was different. No one looked at me differently.
I was just Dylan Hopkins; there was nothing more to me.
Maybe that was because I was never without Shane and Reid – maybe they took the focus off me.
But here, I felt like there was a sign over my head in rainbow-colored letters flashing “homo” wherever I went.
I was pretty sure Scott caught me staring at Shane in the weight room the other night.
He glared at me sideways and whispered something under his breath to Eric who immediately looked my way.
It became nearly impossible to be around everyone in the weight room and even more so after we worked out.
My brain was turning into a jumbled mess and I had no clue how to un-mess it.
So while everyone was out doing whatever it was that they did after we were free for the day, I pulled out my journal and tried to clear my head.
Most nights, I wrote until my hand felt like it was going to fall off, but tonight, Shane came barreling through door, laughing like a fool.
Before he could see it, I slid my journal in-between the mattress and box spring and sat up straight against the wall. “You gotta come down to the lake,” Shane puffed out, trying to catch his breath.
“Why?” I kicked my legs over the side of the bed and slid my feet into my Nike sandals, ready to go in an instant, despite the skepticism in my voice.
I grabbed my key from the desk and pulled it over my neck, letting in fall down my back in-between my shoulder blades.
The humid summer air that was usually unbearable during the day was marginally better.
As we walked closer to the lake, the air grew a bit cooler.
The moonlight shimmered across the lake as a loon called out in the distance.
In the shadows, I could see a bunch of the guys huddled together under a tree, the bright glare of what I assumed was a computer screen lighting their faces up in the glow.
“What the hell?” I kept the words to a low mumble, one hopefully only I heard. The moans I thought I heard from a few feet back were now growing louder and louder as we approached the group.
It seemed as if no one even noticed us as we sat down. They were obviously glued to the screen where the girl on girl porn was playing. “Eric swiped it from his older brother,” Shane said by way of explanation.
You could have heard a pin drop. Except for the noises coming from the computer, no one spoke. I watched on and tried my best to appear interested; though I’m pretty sure no one was paying attention to me.
Shit, if I thought my head was fucked up before this, it was even more so now.
In the back of my brain, the part that was always trying to maintain the perfect cover for who I knew I really was, I couldn’t help but think this was all some kind of game.
Perhaps a trick that Eric and Scott were trying to play on me after our stilted exchange of glares in the weight room the other day.
Rather than getting too ahead of myself, I sat there calmly and tried not to get too worried about being outed. Besides what did they have as proof?
You checking out another guy. That’s what they’ve got against you.
The laptop lid slamming shut shook me out of my worry. “Dude, that was fucking hot. You have to get more of those,” Ryan, one of Scott and Eric’s friends from their hometown team said as he not-so-casually grabbed at his crotch, disguising it as readjusting himself.
Without saying anything, Scott looked over his shoulder at me, his face half-hidden, half-lit by the moon. “Hot, right, Dylan?” Insinuation was thick in his words.
I didn’t think the other guys heard the accusation in what he’d just said, or the sneer in his tone, but I did. “Hell yeah, it was,” I spat out quickly, with what was hopefully not too much eagerness to seem unconvincing.
“All right, boys. It’s been real, but I’m being eaten alive out here. Damn mosquitos.” Eric swatted away an imaginary bug before adding, “I’m heading back to the room.”
Snorting through his laughter, Scott stood next to him. “Bugs, my ass. You just want to go jerk off in the shower before I get back to the room.”
“How about I race you back to the dorm and whoever gets there first gets the shower for as long as they need while the other one has to wait in the hallway?” Without even giving him a beat to react, Scott sprinted toward the dorms, leaving Eric more than a few steps behind while the rest of us stood there laughing at them.
“And that is why I’m happy to be in a single this year.” Ryan clapped his hand to my shoulder, setting me on edge even more than I had already been. “See you in the morning,” he said as he strode away from us.
The awkward silence that descended upon Shane and me as we stood there alone was crippling – at least for me.
Wordlessly, we walked back to our room. After tossing my key on the desk, I flopped back into my bed and stared up at the ceiling.
“You can have the bathroom first. I’m gonna go call Reid.
Check up on him.” Shane’s words clogged in his throat with some kind of unnamed emotion, one which I chose to ignore.
Shane slipped back out the door so quickly, I didn’t have any time to respond, not that I would have known what to say. Reaching for my journal, I pulled the pen out from the spiraled wire, my words flowing with more clarity than my brain was capable of.
I don’t think most people can pinpoint the actual moment they discover who they are.
I mean, you hear stories all the time about people wasting their life trying to figure out their purpose, trying to figure out who they are and what they’re meant to be.
I’m not going to pretend that I know all of the answers – that’d be a huge fucking lie, but I do know more about myself now than I did an hour ago.
I guess I’ve always known I was different somehow, but I just wrote it off with a million different excuses. Maybe I’m different because my parents are still happily married or because I’m an only child.
But when those excuses run out and you start thinking that you’re different because there’s something inherently ‘wrong’ with you, that’s when it gets complicated.
Yeah, I know they say – whoever the hell ‘they’ are – that growing up isn’t easy, that being a sixteen-year-old boy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, but I’ve known for maybe longer than I care to admit that whatever is making my life difficult, whatever is screwing me up in my head is much more than normal teenage shit.
Watching what I watched tonight only confirmed what I’ve known for probably my whole life.
I’m gay.
The door slamming shut scared the shit out of me and I quickly tossed my journal under my pillow, my heart pounding like crazy in my chest. Shane didn’t notice as he crashed his phone down on the desk angrily.
“Everything okay?” I asked as I tossed back the covers.
His fists were clenched at his side; the anger vibrated off him, filling the room with a palpable tension. “What the fuck do you think?” he roared, punching the door with rage.
I jumped off my bed as he clutched his right hand and winced in pain. “What the hell did you do that for? You’ll break your throwing hand, asshole.”
“I don’t fucking care, anymore.” Some of the bite left him, and he calmed marginally. He slinked down onto his bed, hanging his head in his hands. “It’s so fucking unfair,” he gritted, stifling back his rising emotions.
I sat next to him, far enough away to leave him some space, but close enough to let him know I was listening. “What happened? Is it Reid?”
He punched the bed with his good hand – at least both wouldn’t be broken.
“No, it’s my fucking asshole father. Reid came home late the other night and dear-old-dad knocked him around a bit,” he snidely remarked as he stood from the bed, pacing the room like a caged animal.
“I don’t know what the fuck to do. He’s getting out of control.
At first, he would just yell at Mom. Then he would just lash out at me, smack me around a little, but now, this.
Reid says he can barely open his eye; it’s so swollen.
” He flopped into the chair at the desk and looked at his hand as it turned purple and swelled.
“You need to put ice on that. Let me go get it so Coach doesn’t see you.” I moved to the door as he muttered, “thanks” before I left.
In the two minutes it took me to walk down to the water cooler to grab a bag of ice, I tried to make sense of what made it okay for a father to beat his own son, but it turned out that two minutes wasn’t enough time.
I twisted the knob to our door and saw Shane sitting on my bed, my journal open and in his hands.
He looked up at me as if I was some kind of intruder, or as if he was seeing me for the first time. Considering what I was sure he’d just read, that was certainly true. “What are you doing?” Shock colored my words as I tore the spiral notebook from his bruised hand.
He looked up at me, sadness and confusion mixing on his face. “You’re gay?” he whispered as if anyone else was in the room to hear his words. Hearing Shane say it somehow made it feel more real than when I had written it, thought it, knew it in my own soul.
In the few moments it took me to answer him, I considered denying it, but there was no point.
The words were messily scribbled right there on the page for him to read.
I was just happy I hadn’t finished my thoughts.
The ones where I wrote about how confused I was for wanting my best friend, for thinking that he was gay as well – even though I knew he would never admit to it himself.
“Yeah, I am,” I admitted sheepishly before sinking onto my bed. With my secret out in the open, there was no sense in hiding the journal any longer, but out of the habit that I had developed over the last week, I tucked it in between my mattress and box spring, even though Shane looked on.
“How? When?” he barely whispered as he scrubbed his hand over his face and through his sandy-brown hair in disbelief.
“I don’t know,” I said after taking a deep breath.
“I guess I’ve always known, as cliché as that sounds.
” I stood to walk over to him, but he held his hand out to stop me.
“Look, I don’t want this to change things.
We’re still friends, right?” I held my hands up, palms facing out in an attempt to surrender to him and his confusion.
He didn’t say anything, just stood up and grabbed his keys from the desk. “I’m gonna go stay at Scott and Eric’s tonight.” He shut the door behind him without saying anything more.
He didn’t speak to me at all the next day, or the rest of the week, or on the two-hour car ride home, or the first day of school.
In fact, Shane didn’t speak to me for most of the next ten months, and on the first day of baseball season in the spring of our senior year, all I got from my best friend of over ten years was a subtle chin nod.